
Documentaries and animations and comedies were there, Horton the elephant was even there, but they were overwhelmed by an onslaught of violent language: killer, murder, tragic, sadistic, relentless, vicious, violent, mutilated, brutal, amoral, gruesome, psychotic, hideous, and on and on.
The majority of the films were action-oriented and murderous. I'm as used to, and immune to, this stuff as anybody who watches movies, but that night it reached a critical mass. So I decided to extract a selection of descriptive phrases from those cable movie listings to serve as a contemplation on entertainment in our culture.
The extract that most caught my attention with its bizarrely mundane presentation of the plot was this: "His drinking starts to interfere with his assassination duties...." So, is this a fall-down-drunk-and-couldn't-hit-the-side-of-a-barn comedy? Or are assassins now presented as skilled high achievers -- as long as they manage their drinking?
I planned to list some of the other phrases I extracted from the movie listing to show how they are individually more or less commonplace, but how they collectively describe a film industry and a culture drunk on violence. (There's that drinking problem again.) But I think we've all seen enough of that stuff.
Instead, here's a video essay on how the mpaa film rating system is much more tolerant of violence than of sexual content in films.
No comments:
Post a Comment